A collection of poems that explores the radical love inherent in revolutionary work through cultural objects, adolescent affect, and queerness from within the fall of empire.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive queer punk movement that emerged in Spain during its transition from Franquist Fascism to democracy, La Movida moves from bed to street to river, defending memory and falling in love along the way.

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About the Author
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta was raised in Los Angeles, California by a family of single women, and grew up traveling and living across the western United States and Mexico with their mother, a cultural anthropologist. Tatiana's first book, The Easy Body, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2017; their writing has appeared in SFMOMA Open Space and Wolfman New Life Quarterly. They live in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, around the corner from where they work as a barista at a pop and pop cafe video rental store hybrid and as a peer sexual health educator at CCSF's Project SURVIVE.

Reviews

"Inspiration: handy stuff, if you can find it. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta secured theirs in the revolutionary struggles of Chicana feminists and Spain's Post-Franco queer punk movement, so this collection doesn't play nice with fascists and colonizers."-Matt Sutherland, Foreword

"In their second book La Movida, they write, 'The dancing water / replaced my tongue with a knife.' These are the shifts I so often find myself drawn to in poetry. Crackling images, with language as a means to become something more empowered."-Diana Arterian, Literary Hub

"These poems are witty, incredibly smart and playful, and hold incredible weight, stitched together through romantic love, delightful optimism, nightmares and scar tissue."-rob mclennan

"Both raw & elegant, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta's La Movida embraces the vulnerability of the individual who finds strength in collective struggle. Whether driven by 'desire, or / the agonizing pleasure / of self-torture,' here, they exist 'in complicated love.' Here, they know no 'better / way to deal with a broken / heart than a riot.' Here, 'virgo could be / [their] gender, or / it could be [their] sexuality.' Among marigolds, razors, crystal balls and natal charts, Luboviski-Acosta recovers the potency of the wail of La Llorona, a 'wail [that] will drown you, too.'"-Wendy Trevino

"At once soft and jarring, LA MOVIDA walks a morbid path through fields of corporeal indulgence, introspection and repulsion-submission and protest. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta's work voices keen self-observation, and a fiercely unique power to confront and envelope simultaneously, with compassion. One is crushed and sustained by the weight of these careful, assertive pieces."-Liz Harris

"There is an easy voice here both guileless and full of guile, sometimes full of adult world-weariness sometimes as naive as a child, then looking at its own naievete and laughing, and showing us its wounds, a little proudly, a little insouciantly. La Movida is romantic, filled with love and longing and friendship and revolution. It is also Romantic in the old sense of the poetic tradition. Here is a poet who is willing-even desirous-to be torn apart for a glimpse of Beauty."-Julian Talamantez Brolaski

"Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta's La Movida is an ecstatic shriek, a horror-feminist wail-song bellowing from a dark pit, where the ones covered in lucent blood vibrate with the eros of insurrection. Witchy, unapologetic, mythic-these incandescent poems avow, with a queer punk irreverence, the dismembering force of desire and the revolutionary potential of anti-colonial vengeance. Let yourself be cut by Luboviski-Acosta's razor-sharp verse."-Jackie Wang

Book Information
ISBN 9781643621463
Author Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Nightboat Books
Publisher Nightboat Books